Like the other military-chivalric orders—the Templars, the Knights Hospitaller, and their equivalents in Spain and Portugal—the Teutonic Knights functioned as the vanguard of Christendom, carrying the banner of the Church into pagan territory. The colonisation and settlement of Prussia and the Baltic was officially described as a ‘crusade’—as much so as the ‘crusades’ that temporarily annexed the Holy Land, that exterminated the Cathar heretics of the Languedoc, that drove Islam from the Iberian peninsula. And like the other military-chivalric orders, the Teutonic Knights served as a kind of repository for Western nobles seeking to gain experience of the battlefield, and obtain military initiation and expertise. Campaigning in Prussia and the Baltic became a kind of blood sport. The Teutonic Knights played host to aristocrats from all over Europe in quest of the excitement of combat—and Papal dispensation. Among them were a number of Scots, such as Henry Sinclair of Roslin. Henry, Earl of Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV of England, on being exiled by Richard II, also campaigned with the Teutonic Knights. From them, he learned many of the martial and political skills that would enable him eventually to return to England, depose Richard and establish his own dynasty.
At the end of the fourteenth century (the time when Bolingbroke was serving with them), the Teutonic Knights were at the peak of their power. The Ordenstaat over which they presided encompassed the whole of Christianised north-eastern Europe, a fiefdom the size of England, Scotland and Wales combined. It was effectively remote from all other authority, spiritual or temporal. Operating well beyond the reach of the pope and all secular Western potentates, the Teutonic Knights were a law unto themselves, and the Ordenstaat was regarded as a nation-state in its own right. It had its own capital at Marianburg (now Malbork, in Poland), and its own political and administrative machinery. It sent and received its own embassies to and from Western courts, to and from Rome. The governing hierarchy, headed by the Grand Master, was accorded the same respect, status and honours as that of any Western European principality.
Then, in 1410, at the Battle of Tannenburg—some sixty miles from where Hitler was subsequently to build his ‘Wolf’s Lair’ at Rastenburg—the Teutonic Knights suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of a combined Polish and Lithuanian army. From that point on, their domain began to shrink, their power to decline, although the Ordenstaadt survived for another century.
At last, in 1525, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, came under the influence of Martin Luther and converted to Protestantism. He was followed by others, and the Order itself was secularised. Later that year Albrecht was made Duke of Prussia, owing allegiance to the Polish throne, and Prussia became a defined political and administrative entity. In the domains of the newly created duchy, brethren of the Teutonic Knights—the younger sons of a much older German aristocracy—began to marry, bring up families and establish their own land holdings. It was these men, and, even more, those they had ushered into the region as settlers and colonists, who comprised the so-called ‘Junker’ class.
In 1618, the duchy of Prussia passed into the hands of another branch of the Hohenzollern family, who ruled the territory known as Brandenburg. Brandenburg and Prussia were thus amalgamated. Then, in 1701, Albrecht von Hohenzollern’s descendant assumed the title of Friedrich I and proclaimed himself ‘King in Prussia’, being anointed by two Protestant bishops but placing the crown on his head himself.
When Prussia emerged as a kingdom, Queen Anne’s reign in England was about to begin, while that of Louis XIV in France was nearing its end. French military supremacy on the continent was soon to be challenged by the Duke of Marlborough and his Austrian colleague, Prince Eugène of Savoy. Yet within half a century, Prussia was abruptly to assume the rôle of Europe’s predominant martial power. She was to do so under only the third of her kings, Friedrich II, better known as Frederick the Great, the single most brilliant and resourceful commander of the eighteenth century. Under Friedrich, Prussia—a mere minor duchy only a few years before—became one of the most important components in the shifting kaleidoscope known as the European ‘balance of power’. Her army was regarded as a model, and duly emulated by those of Britain, France, Austria and Russia. And the Junker class, the country’s military and administrative elite, consolidated their ascendancy.
After the Napoleonic Wars the 1,789 domains comprising Germany were reduced in number to 39. Of these Prussia benefited most and, with its consolidated domains, was now in a position to challenge Austrian influence over such principalities as Bavaria, which included the Stauffenbergs’ native home near Stuttgart in the ancient region of Swabia.
Not even by this time was Prussia synonymous with Germany. So far as Germany was concerned, Prussia was still largely alien territory. Germany, in the world’s eyes, lay elsewhere, and the Germans resided elsewhere. Even England—with her Saxon heritage, seventeenth-century dynastic links with the Palatinate of the Rhine and eighteenth-century Hannoverian monarchs—was considered more ‘German’ than Prussia, much of whose population consisted of Balts, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Russians and Scandinavians. And the Hohenzollerns, as well as the Junker class, were regarded, especially by the older aristocracy of southern Germany, as mere parvenu upstarts, backwoods yokels or semi-barbarians, only partially civilised and descruffed, still damp with vestiges of hyperborean mist.
Despite more recent assumptions, then, the real heartland of old Germany had nothing whatever to do with Prussia; and the original German aristocracy—the aristocracy from which the Stauffenberg family issued—long predated that of the ‘uncouth’ east. Old Germany’s heartland consisted of the Rhine and its environs, particularly the region known as Schwaben or, in its anglicised version, Swabia. Swabia lies in the northern foothills of the Alps. On the west, it is bounded by the Rhine, on the east by the river Lech, beyond which lies Bavaria. Its principal cities are Ulm, Augsburg and Stuttgart. Prior to the fourteenth century, when the cantons won their independence, Swabia included much of what is now Switzerland, as well as Lake Constance.
The landscape is probably the most beautiful, the most majestic and most hauntingly evocative in Germany. Vineyards alternate with thickly wooded slopes. Rivers thread their way through deep valleys nestled between steep forest-shagged hills, dense-foliaged mountains and stark projecting crags, many of them surmounted by monasteries or castles. From these strategic eminences, control could be exercised over fords, bridges, road junctions and passes. It was from one such eminence—Castle Hohenstauffen, some twenty-five miles to the east of Stuttgart—that the dynasty issued through which the Holy Roman Empire, and the culture of the high Middle Ages, attained their highest achievements.
In 800, Charlemagne had become the first ruler of the newly created Holy Roman Empire. By means of this imperium, the Church hoped to organise Western Europe into a pattern based on the Old Testament monarchy of ancient Israel, which accommodated two ‘Messiahs’ or ‘anointed ones’, the king and the high priest. The Holy Roman Empire was intended to replicate this religio-political structure, with secular or temporal authority being exercised by the emperor, spiritual authority by the pope. Sacred and profane were thus, at least in theory, to be welded into a unity that facilitated the process of administration and government—and firmly subordinated, again in theory, secular affairs to those of the Church.
On Charlemagne’s death, the secular empire he had yoked inseparably to the Papacy ws sub-divided among his sons. The temporal sphere of the intended pan-European theocracy became increasingly more fragmented, increasingly a law—or multitude of laws—unto itself. By the Middle Ages, France, England, Italy, Spain and other nations had begun to evolve national, cultural and, in some cases, political identities of their own, often with their own autonomous rulers and administrative apparatus; and the Holy Roman Empire, though it continued to exist under that name, had become, to all intents and purposes, the German Empire, the first Reich. In the language of the time, it was accepted as commonplace to
speak of the Holy Roman Emperor as the German Emperor, and of the empire itself as simply Germany.
Swabia was created as a duchy in 917. By the end of the eleventh century, the duchy had passed into the hands of the Hohenstauffen (‘High Stauffen’) dynasty. In 1155, the Duke of Swabia, Friedrich III von Hohenstauffen, became the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich I, also known as Friedrich Barbarossa (‘Red Beard’). When he ascended the imperial throne, he was already a veteran of the ill-fated Second Crusade of 1147 and, in 1154, had embarked on a project that was to occupy him for much of his life, the subjugation and annexation of Italy. This was to bring him into conflict with the pope, who, in 1160, excommunicated him—thus, rather embarrassingly, leaving the Holy Roman Empire neither holy nor Roman. Friedrich responded by storming Rome itself and, in 1166, installing his own puppet pontiff, Paschal III, a personage still unrecognised in the Vatican’s official history. For the next six years, and with the blessing of his pet anti-pope, Friedrich busied himself extending his domains to include Bohemia, Hungary and Poland. Then, in 1174, he made peace with the newly elected ‘official’ pope, Alexander III. He had to abase himself, kneel and kiss the pontiff’s feet, in exchange for which his excommunication was lifted. In the following year, Friedrich contrived to get himself crowned King of Burgundy, which at that time stretched from Marseilles to Basle. By 1184, however, his renewed designs on Italy had brought him into conflict with the Papacy again; and when Urban II ascended the throne of St Peter, open warfare erupted between pope and emperor.
In 1189, Friedrich embarked from Germany with an immense army, intending to join King Richard I of England (Richard Coeur de Lion) on the Third Crusade, but on the way to the Holy Land, while crossing the river Göksu in Turkey, he drowned. His burial site remains a mystery. According to later legends, he lies sleeping in a cave deep within Mount Kyffhäuser, south of the Harz Mountains, awaiting the call to awake and rescue his country in the hour of need.
Friedrich Barbarossa was a vivid and archetypally evocative figure, but his grandson, Friedrich II, was an even more flamboyant personality, who, seven centuries later, was to exert a profound influence on the thinking of the poet Stefan George and of the young Claus von Stauffenberg. Under Friedrich II, the Hohenstauffen dynasty and the Holy Roman Empire attained their zenith. He was born in Italy in 1194 and in 1220, at the age of twenty-six, ascended the imperial throne. By that time, most of the Holy Land had already been lost to Islam, but instead of waging war against the ‘infidels’, Friedrich chose to treat with them, and obtained by negotiation what the crusaders could not by conflict. In 1229, he was crowned King of Jerusalem, entered the Holy City in triumph and obtained Bethlehem, Nazareth and the surrounding countryside as well.
At their maximum extent, Friedrich’s European domains were to include the whole of what is now Italy, as far south as Sicily. They were to include Burgundy, from Provence across the Rhine to Lorraine. They were to include Austria, Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia, Saxony, Brandenburg, Brabant and other duchies, counties and marches in what was then German territory. They were to include Silesia, Pomerania and as much of Prussia as had been conquered and colonised. They were to include Bohemia, Hungary and Poland. In effect, the Hohenstauffen empire encompassed virtually the whole of Europe except for Scandinavia, France, the Iberian peninsula and the Balkans. Friedrich’s temporal power, like that of his grandfather, inevitably brought him into conflict with the Papacy and, like his grandfather, he was excommunicated. Unlike his grandfather, however, he did not care, making no attempt to come to an accommodation with Rome.
Whatever Friedrich’s accomplishments in politics and diplomacy, they were to be eclipsed, at least for posterity, by his activities in other spheres. He was a kind of pre-Renaissance ‘Renaissance Man’, and his mind was one of the most brilliant, most energetic, most insatiably voracious and audacious of the entire Middle Ages. He was to play a crucial rôle in the coalescence of modern Western culture. He spoke six languages, wrote poetry, was impressively versed in falconry, music, philosophy, mathematics and the spectrum of esoteric teachings available to his time. His opulent, cosmopolitan and ultra-sophisticated court in Sicily was a centre and a haven for Judaic and Islamic scholars; and it was through this court that much of their knowledge—algebra, for example, and Arabic numerals—was transmitted to the West. To propagate and disseminate such knowledge, Friedrich founded the University of Naples. Not surprisingly, his encyclopedic and heterodox thinking provoked as much antipathy in the Papacy as did his territorial expansion. He was repeatedly accused of heresy and, even worse, apostasy; and he seems, indeed, seriously to have considered converting to Islam. Although he remained nominally Christian, his attitudes towards most things had little in common with the orthodoxy of the era. This included his attitude towards wedlock. His first marriage, at the age of fourteen, was to the daughter of the King of Aragon and the widow of the King of Hungary. His second was to Isabella, daughter of King John of England. Neither of these dynastic alliances prevented him from maintaining a harem in the Arab style.
From the milieu of the Hohenstauffen emperors, and particularly from that of Friedrich II, there sprang such phenomena as the poetic mystique of the Rhine, as expressed in the early thirteenth-century epic the Nibelungenlied, which provided, of course, the basis for Wagner’s Ring. From the same milieu there also sprang perhaps the supreme flowering of medieval high culture. One especially important and durable manifestation of this was the work composed by Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Walther von der Vogelweide, as well as the Minnesänger and Meistersänger who midwifed the epoch’s great corpus of lyric, dramatic and narrative poetry. At the court of the Hohenstauffen, poetry contests and festivals were a regular occurrence, and bards competed with each other as they did in Ireland and Wales centuries before. The ritual of the poetry festival spread as far east as Marianburg, where it became a feature at the court of the Grand Master of those supposedly ascetic and austere warrior-monks, the Teutonic Knights.
It was also from the milieu of the Hohenstauffen empire and its high culture that the Stauffenberg family first issued. The family name, Schenk, now usually means ‘publican’, but it can also signify ‘cup-bearer’, and this was the sense attached to it in Hohenstauffen times. ‘Cup-bearer’ was an officially recognised court title and position (rather like ‘Steward’ in Scotland, which evolved into a family surname and then, as ‘Stuart’, into the name of a royal dynasty). The ancestors of the modern Stauffenberg family first appear on the stage of history as Schenken, or ‘cup-bearers’, to the powerful Swabian Counts of Zollern, who, from the mid-fourteenth century on, were known as the ‘High Zollern’, or Hohenzollern. Ruins of the original Stauffenberg castle can still be seen at the tiny Swabian hamlet of Stauffenberger Hof.
It is not known precisely how far back in time the family extends. The first name to appear officially in the record is Werner, Schenk von Zollern, in 1257. The family’s full name first appears on a deed dating from 1317 which bears the signatures of three brothers: Burkhard Schenk von Stauffenberg, Berthold Schenk von Stauffenberg and Werner Schenk von Andeck. It is from the last of these, through his son, Hannes Schenk von Stauffenberg, that the modern Stauffenberg family descends.1
The family produced a predictable number of military figures. At least three Stauffenbergs served with the Teutonic Knights and at least two others with the Knights of St John, one of them becoming a high functionary of that order. Another served in the army of Charles, Connétable (Constable) de Bourbon, who rebelled against François I, joined the Habsburg Emperor Charles V to defeat and capture the French king at the Battle of Pavia in 1519, then went on to besiege Rome. There were also many ecclesiastics in the family, and a significant number of scholars. As early as 1310, two of Hannes Schenk von Stauffenberg’s brothers were enrolled at the University of Bologna, and a tradition of learning was to persist in the line from then on. So, too, did a tradition of piety. In 1468, two Stauffenbergs, with an
entourage of forty men, embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, visiting Bethlehem and the Jordan.2
Within Germany proper, the Stauffenbergs enjoyed the status of Free Knights of the Empire. This was denoted by the title ‘Freiherr’ and, like that of an English baronetcy, was hereditary. Indeed, ‘Freiherr’ is often translated as ‘baron’ to differentiate it from ‘Ritter’, which denotes an ‘ordinary’ knight. The Free Knights of the Empire were a uniquely German institution. Some were immensely wealthy, others poverty-stricken; some owned vast estates, others no more than a single castle or, even less, a manor house or fortified farm. But a Free Knight was, as the designation implies, accountable to no one save the emperor—who was usually too far away, or too apathetic, to exercise any control over him. A Free Knight’s holdings might lie in the domains of a count, duke or even king, but none of them could wield authority over a Free Knight, who was deemed, technically, to be a nobleman of equal rank. A Free Knight was exempt from all taxes save those due the emperor, and he could flout with impunity all laws the emperor had not personally decreed.
The Free Knights were symbolic embodiments in Germany of autonomy, self-sufficiency and independence. They were fiercely proud of their independence and defended it tenaciously. In many respects, they were the stuff of legend: romantic, dashing and often buccaneering figures who exemplified a spirit envied by much more powerful, yet also responsible, potentates. Thus do they appear in the late eighteenth-century play Götz von Berlichingen, the work with which a then unknown young writer named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe made his literary debut.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 9
